If a person suffers from a urinary incontinence, for example, if a person suffers from a stress urinary incontinence, then urine leakage can be caused by application of abdominal pressure during normal exercise or by laughing, coughing, sneezing, or the like. The cause of this may be, for example, that the pelvic floor muscle which is a muscle for supporting the urethra is loosened by birth.
For the treatment of urinary incontinence, a surgical treatment is effective, in which there is used, for example, a tape-shaped implant called a “sling.” The sling is indwelled inside the body and the urethra is supported by the sling (see, for example, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2010-99499). In order to indwell the sling inside the body, an operator would incise the vagina wall with a surgical knife, dissect a region between the urethra and the vagina, and make the dissected region and the outside communicate with each other through an obturator foramen of a pelvis by use of a puncture needle, forming a puncture hole. Then, by use of such a puncture hole, the sling is indwelled into the body.
If the vagina wall is once incised, however, there is a fear that there occurs a phenomenon in which the sling will be exposed to the inside of the vagina from a wound caused by the incision, and that complications can occur caused by an infection from the wound or the like. In addition, since the vagina wall is incised, the invasiveness of the procedure can be relatively great and burdensome on the patient. In addition, there is a risk that the urethra might be damaged in the course of the procedure by the operator and there is a risk that the operator might damage his/her fingertip with a surgical knife.